Hindu Use of Buddhist Priests

The Newar Buddhist Vajracarya priests have sometimes been referred to as "Buddhist Brahmans" (e.g., Greenwold 1974), but this is misleading. The roles they play within the Newar Buddhist community itself differs from that of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans for the Hindu community in important respects. The Vajracaryas perform many of the functions (astrology, Tantric sacrifice, aspects of death ritual, etc.) that the non-Brahman priests and para-priests do in the Newar Hindu system, and they also perform healing procedures done in Hindu Bhaktapur by special thar s of healers. The fact that the Vajracaryas can perform these functions without compromising their status indicates an important difference between the Hindu Newar system and the "Hinduized" Buddhist Newar system. The Hindu Newar opposition and interplay between the traditional system of purity, headed and symbolized by the Brahman in his protected public image on the one hand and the "nonmoral" supernatural transactions, particularly those of the Tantric system, on the other, is blurred in the Newar Buddhist system, altering, among other things, the comparative significance of Newar Buddhist Tantra and of the Newar Buddhist high priests.^[27]

There are various ways in which the Vajracarya participate in the Hindu-centered system. People in the middle and lower thar s may use Vajracaryas as astrologers or healers. Toffin (1984, 230) has reported of Newar communities elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley that some thar s use Vajracarya priests in the purifying (and contaminating) gha:su jagye ceremony to remove the contamination of a death from a house, a ceremony that is performed by Tints in Bhaktapur. Some thar s in Bhak-

tapur (chap. 5) use Vajracaryas as family priests, either exclusively, or, in the case of middle-level thar s, in some combination with a Brahman purohita . These clients include both the more properly "Buddhist" thar s and marginally clean thar s. Some marginally clean thar s are served by the Vajracayas as family priests, as others are by Tini and Lakhae Brahmans. This service is, perhaps, in large part, an opportunistic profiting from an economic opportunity left open to Vajracaryas and these other priestly thar s by the purity constraints preventing the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans from working with families below the Jyapu level.

We must include one residual service of Buddhist priests to Hindu Bhaktapur. An important segment of one of Bhaktapur's major Hindu festivals, the climactic festival of Mohani, centers around the "living goddess" Kumari, incarnated in an upper-status Buddhist girl (chap. 15). Certain Vajracarya priests play a part in the selection and maintenance of that child deity.